Year Of The Penguin

The new year has barely begun, and it’s already looking like the Year of the Penguin, at least for me. I’ve got some Red Hat certification training coming up in February, more as a refresher than anything else. Then, I start my training towards my certification for VMWare ESX (which runs on a bare-bones Linux kernel).

On top of that, I’m in the midst of a side project to get an old laptop up-and-running with Damn Small Linux for my mother-in-law to use in the kitchen, which is proving to be a bit troublesome: the old BIOS doesn’t support CD booting, and the floppy drive is shot. I’m working on an article that will get posted later on this project, but first I need to finish the project itself!

Finally, I’ll be doing some beer bashes with a friend of mine who is just starting in to Linux. He initially asked me to tutor him, but I suggested that perhaps a less formal atmosphere would be a better approach for both of us. Plus, I know a few things about Linux, but not enough to really tutor him properly in my opinion.

And now, I will look in to my LCD ball and issue my I.T.-related predictions for 2007:

Virtualization: This one will be even hotter than last year. The big players all appear to be getting ready to wage some serious corporate warfare over the market, since it’s still a mostly untapped one.

Windows: Vista will be released to a non-plussed general public. I doubt we’ll see the kind of high adoption rates that were seen in previous releases, except with new systems being sold by the big manufacturers, and corporations who get a nice discount on their licenses.

Linux: There will continue to be growth in this area as people figure out new and exciting ways to make a living on Linux and related Open Source projects

Hardware: With SanDisk’s recent announcement of their flash-based hard drive for laptops, I think we’ll see this start to roll out in the higher-end systems. Probably won’t pick up too much, as large flash drives are still a bit expensive for most people.

Security: Spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam. Probably no major shifts in the current trends.